If you reencode to a more efficient codec, you can save ridiculous amounts of space. If you’re interested in reencoding and are willing to play with self hosting, look into Tdarr, it’s an app that can reencode your whole library. Been using it for a while after switching from my personal solution has been wonderful. I just put files into my media directories and it picks it up, reencodes the file and replaces the original if everything checks out.
Its running RAID (SHR I think) so it just screamed at me for a while until I figured out what was going on. Once a new disk was obtained, I was able to power down, swap disks and resilver the array with no data loss. I turned off a number of services I run during the time I was down a spare disk to make sure I didn’t put to much stress on the array, but otherwise I was still able to run my NAS/media servers without much issue.
I’ve got a DS416 that I’ve had for almost a decade, and its still going strong. Worst thing I’ve had to deal with is a shucked easystore drive that died, but the other 3 are running fine.
Hell, I remember when they had ‘Max’ back when I watched on my PS3. I absolutely loved that it would ask me a bunch of questions and then give me a movie to watch. I’m surprised I haven’t seen that more around, that was an amazing feature.
but you have to switch to podman some day anyway
Can you elaborate on this?
I actually had my first WD failure this past month, a 10tb drive I shucked from an easystore years ago (and a couple moves ago). My Synology dropped the disk and I’ve replaced it, and the other 3 in the NAS bought around the same time are chugging away like champs.
Or my partners greeting me in the morning “Home assistant went down again, so the lights are all manual”
Thankfully that one is mostly solved.